Strengthening Methods for Assessing Students’ Metahistorical Conceptions: Initial Development of the Historical Account Differences Survey

Abstract

To prepare students for participation in a pluralistic, democratic society, history curriculum should help them develop mature ideas about why multiple accounts of the same events exist. But how can we know if we are successful? In this article, we describe work on the design, validation, and piloting of a paper-and-pencil instrument called the Historical Account Differences (HAD) survey. It is intended to add to the tool set that researchers and practitioners can use to evaluate students’ developing metahistorical conceptions. Data are presented from a pilot involving sixty-five eleventh-grade students. One group completed the survey once, whereas the other completed it prior to and after a curriculum unit designed to enhance their conceptions about multiple accounts of past events. Initially, the two groups’ responses were not detectably different. However, students completing the two-week curriculum unit showed an increase in mature conceptions. The limitations of this work and plans for future research are discussed.

Keywords:

• history
• metahistorical conceptions
• accounts
• survey
• pluralism

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the financial contributions of the Spencer Foundation, the Canadian Council on Learning, Heritage Canada, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to this ongoing research program. We also acknowledge the generous contributions of time and effort made by Vancouver-area secondary students, their teachers, and our university colleagues, without whom this research would be impossible.

Notes

1 Readers may associate the word “stage” with developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, whose work postulated fixed, age-dependent stages of psychological development (Piaget 1972). However, Shemilt did not observe nor claim any fixed age dependency in students’ progressions from one set of ideas to another. Quite the contrary, he found students at nearly every stage in each age cohort in his sample.

2 Of course the stage indicators are not present in the instrument itself.